Are you considering starting a blog? Maybe your blog isn’t working for you? Blogging is one of the hottest ways to build business online.

It’s changed considerably from the early days of “dear diary” and “angry conspiracy theorist” blogs. Even Time Magazine has started honoring their “Best Blogs” of the year.

Here are eight questions to ask–keys if you will to blogging success.

#1: Are You Passionate?

In The New Rules of Marketing & PR, David Meerman Scott urges would-be bloggers to “be passionate about and want the world to know about” their subject. If you need copy written for a corporate blog and you don’t have a fire in your belly for the subject matter, delegate to or hire someone who does.

Though they had been around for many years, blogs burst on the scene as a hot marketing tool around 2003 when marketers discovered easy-to-use blogging platforms like Blogger, Typepad, and WordPress.

However, just because anyone can set up a blog, doesn’t mean everyone should, and many professionals and businesses start blogging without giving any thought to why, how and who will be doing the blogging.

Over 50 percent of blogs are abandoned within the first 90 days. While this isn’t really important if you’re writing a personal diary, political or celebrity blog, it is very important if you start a blog for your business and don’t keep posting on it consistently and with purpose.

When a prospect lands on a blog that hasn’t been updated in months, it’s akin to walking into a vacant store with busted windows and dust blowing in. It’s just not pretty; and it doesn’t look good for you, your business reputation and your branding.

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